Posted
by
timothy
on Tuesday January 15, 2013 @09:44AM
from the and-one-and-two-and-one-and-two dept.

First time accepted submitter Shaterri writes "Which is more likely: that a low-ranked player could play through a high-level tournament at grandmaster level, or that they were getting undetected assistance from a computer? How about when that player is nearly strip-searched with no devices found? How about when their moves correlate too well with independent computer calculations? Ken Regan has a fascinating article on one of the most complex (potential) cheating cases to come along in recent memory."

While there may come a day when this is necessary, we're far from that point now.

The man suspected of cheating in the article was relying on analysis being performed somewhere outside of the tournament hall, which was then broadcast to him. This was enabled by having the moves of all the games broadcast live over the internet (which normal for tournaments like this). When they suspected him of cheating they disabled the broadcast, and he blundered predictably. It seems that all they need to stop this kind of cheating is a simple one or two move delay on the broadcast of games.

The economics of chess mean there isn't enough prize money to cover the cost of very sophisticated methods of cheating at the rank-and-file tournaments. There is money for the top 10 players in the world, so if cheating spreads that far maybe a faraday cage will show practical application.

The man suspected of cheating in the article was relying on analysis being performed somewhere outside of the tournament hall, which was then broadcast to him.

While that's a fine assumption, there's not a single bit of physical proof to back that up. That's the basis of this whole "conundrum". The entire body of evidence they have against the guy is purely statistical. It would be interesting to sponsor a challenge or competition to try and reproduce how he would have done this, starting with the participants being searched. Even so, without any proof we can't really accuse him of cheating. He can always just use the "put up or shut up" defense.

A simple wireless enabled butt plug and knowledge of Morse code or similar encoding is all that would be required. Unless they scanned the entire frequency spectrum and found nothing, meaning that nobody in the room had an electronic device that radiates, then my good friend Occam thinks this is likely to be the answer.

Your suggested wireless enabled anal probe allows transmission of coded data to the chess player who is cheating. But how does the remote computer know what move the cheater's opponent made? You must also describe a mechanism whereby the cheating chess player is able to transmit the opponent's move back to the remote computer.

The NYT article [nytimes.com] linked from TFA clearly states that the tournament was broadcast live on the internet, and this fellow lost due to a rudimentary mistake in the last round when the organizers switched off the live broadcast, which lends some credence to the OP's suggestion. As another poster stated, a 1 or 2 move delay in the live broadcast would mitigate this issue.

But how does the remote computer know what move the cheater's opponent made? You must also describe a mechanism whereby the cheating chess player is able to transmit the opponent's move back to the remote computer.

Dead simple. The moves were broadcast in real time on the internet by the game organisers. This is apparently a common practice for chess tournaments, just as it is for sports. And we can be pretty sure that that's the way that this part of the cheating was done, because in the penultimate game they switched off the internet broadcast, and that was one of the two games which the cheat lost.

Depends on your venue. In the United States, chess runs a bit more lean and mean. A state tournament I participated in had less that one director observing per section. There actually have been cases of collusion to cheat using electronic devices and "observers". All it takes is an observer whispering the moves in a microphone to someone on the other end, and then signals back to the player. You'd only need to do it in critical position. Two or three key moves in a game would be enough to tip the balance in

He was playing at a 3000 level, and suspected of cheating. So they disabled the live internet broadcast of the game, and suddenly he was playing at barely above a 2000 level.

If you wish to claim he was not cheating, you still need to explain away how he was playing so well when and only when the game was being broadcast live over the internet, and was playing so poorly once the feed was disabled.

The fact he was cheating is clear by that alone. Disabling a live internet feed that you yourself are not watch

Did you reply to the wrong post? Re-read what I wrote. I neither claimed he was or was not cheating. What I did do was offer a very simple explanation of how he could have cheated, which is valid without regard to if he cheated or not. Frankly, I don't care if he cheated or not. I simply find it amusing that there are people who couldn't think of a simple and plausible way that he may have cheated. Once again, to be clear, I certainly never stated or implied that he did not cheat.

It is possible that the chess equivalent of a lower-league football player could find incredible reserves of concentration and mental clarity for the first time in his career. It is equally possible that he could have solicited help in some imaginative form-Take athletics as an example - an athlete who improves their personal best performances year on year has not yet reached their peak. But if they improve too much in one year, then the suspicion of drug-assistance is raised and they can be tested for that. Sometimes, the athlete is guilty, but the drug is so new that their tests return a negative result, so they are allowed to continue competing. Subsequent improvements in the test process allow for re-evaluation and retesting, and retrospective bans.However, with a chess match, no such retrospective action can be taken because if the person cheated and was not caught, how are the invigilators (referees) going to retest? Was the cheating mechanism some kind of visual signal from the audience? If an audience is allowed to live-observe the games, you can have cameras on them, so that can be tested. But just about any other option involves the accused having some kind of signal receiver on their person, and that is not something that can be checked reliably retrospectively.So if they are accused on the spot, then the onus must be on the accuser to prove the accusation on the spot. No proof? Then not guilty, resume the games.

It is possible that the chess equivalent of a lower-league football player could find incredible reserves of concentration and mental clarity for the first time in his career. It is equally possible that he could have solicited help in some imaginative form-

It's possible to have an outlier game but it's very, very unlikely in an activity like chess. A lot of the research into how grand masters learn and play shows that there is an amazing amount of (sub-conscious) memorization taking place. For example, show a grand master a board from a tournament for a split second and they will be able to recreate it from memory without a problem. Show them a board of equal complexity that was randomly generated (i.e. not a position that would ever occur in a real game)

What if they are not cheating? Some possibilities:
1 -- they learned chess mostly/exclusively by playing against a machine rather than against human opponents. Then their strategy would mostly be informed by or similar to the type of gameplay which they have observed kicking their own ass as they learned to play. Thus they might "play like a computer" because they have internalized the computer's algorithms as they learned to play chess.
2 -- they randomly play chess in manners that appear like a computer's algorithms. In fact, hey, when they say that the person's moves closely mirror the moves a computer would make, shouldn't they specify which computer program/algorithm they mean for making chess moves? If you're running gnu/linux, you can play Xboard ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xboard [wikipedia.org] ) as the front-end (visual GUI) with multiple possible engines [wikipedia.org] driving it underneath (such as Gnu chess [wikipedia.org]). You can even run Xboard to provide a running analysis of a game being played by others as you enter the moves played (see the man pages for analysis options). Different engines would probably come up with different moves/styles of play, right? So saying that a person's moves and play style mirror a computer is an insufficiently detailed accusation. The chess engine being suspected ought to be specified and indicated, in my opinion.
3 -- yes it is strange that someone with a normally low rating would suddenly get so far against a grand-master, and yes it is less suspicious when that happens with a yougner player, but why couldn't it occur with an adult player? Suspicion is just suspicion, not evidence.
4 -- there is a comment in the article about using Faraday cages at the match in order to decrease the risk for cheating. Remember that these days computers are very small, smaller than a deck of cards (yes, fancy phone in your pocket, I'm talking about you being as powerful as a supercomputer from the 1970s or 1980s). They could rig a fancy interface for their toes and have a shoe computer for all that you know.
5 -- is this all fallout from the pete rose type stuff, or because of lance armstrong from yesterday?.:>)
A cheating scandal in chess. Wowza.

I play chess at the tournament level, and have played computer chess since the early 80's when the things were little more than jokes.

You simply cannot internalize the chess computer's algorithms. Believe it or not computers suck at chess and positional understanding. I did an experiment where I played a series of games against Fritz. I gave myself infinite time, sometimes taking 30-40 minutes per moves. I am not a titled player, but am above average for a tournament player. I did very well against Fritz when I had time to make sure my calculations were solid and found many times that Fritz really misevaluated the position. In one case, it insisted that it was up by 1.5 pawns but after 6 or 7 normal humans moves that a "C" player would have found, Fritz realized it was actually slightly worse.

Put a computer in a closed position and it flounders. The computer does not understand a position, it simply has a fairly decent evaluation engine combined with the ability to see every stinking possibility. It does not get tired. It does not have the emotional baggage that sometimes makes chess mistakes.

The computers understanding (evaluation) of a position is perhaps FIDE (ELO) 2000. It's calculation ability is perhaps FIDE 4000. Combine the two, and you get a "person" capable of FIDE 3000 chess. Give a grandmaster more time, and you tip the balance to the positional understanding rather than the raw calculation speed.

So now you get to the point about "internalizing" the chess moves is simply not possible. Put a computer in a complex Queen vs Rook ending, and you will see the computer play moves that a human just would never do. It isn't based on a few principles and understanding them. It is based on a 12 eyed monster seeing every stinking move possible 12-14 plies deep. Computers revolutionized our understanding of this endgame and many more.

Beyond the endgame, there are many points in a chess game where you can tell a computer made a move. First, the move objectively works, but does not fit any type of theme, or normal principle of the game. It isn't simply a good or even great move, it isn't that it just doesn't make sense immediately but rather it doesn't fit any framework of human understanding.

So, yes, I am convinced that you can pick up on cheating based upon a series of moves given the right circumstances.

And no, this is nothing new. Cheating has gone on in chess for decades. Computers have just made it easier for the non-elite to cheat.

Even the author of the paper, KW Regan, concedes in his third paragraph that at certain board positions or at certain points in a game, alpha-beta pruning or the chess engines will come to the same "desired move" as a good human player would:

a move that is given a clear standout evaluation by a program is much more likely to be found by a strong human player.

Of course there are points where a human will coincide with a computer. In fact in most cases this will be true. But there are points in a game where there is a wide disparity.

A couple questions for you: Do you play chess? Have you played in a tournament? A nationally rated tournament? Played against computers at top level? Written an algorithm for computer chess? I've done all the above and though I admit I am not a master of chess, I understand how one determines someone

One shouldn't argue purely from authority, but it is possible to make up "facts" on a comment board and have them accepted at face value, when in reality, they're not true. In that case, you probably want to challenge someone based on your credentials. If I am a physicist, I am not going to let you roll over me on black body radiation from non-rotational black holes, but if I prove that I'm an advanced grad student or even a real PhD, and the other guy is a shmuck, maybe you should consider that I may kno

I can point you to players like IM Jeremy Silman who routinely points out that a move is a "computer move" in his books. Go play a computer in a Q v R endgame with you up the Queen. It will outplay any Grandmaster. There are many open positions where a computer will play moves that a GM would not even consider.

And who in the world would pass up fool's mate? It is a checkmate on the second move and I have no idea how this is some type of proof of a computer program?

Anyone who passes up a free checkmate on #2 is clearly not a computer. It is also clearly not an intelligent person. I

Q v R is a known pattern, but that does not mean it is a rote series of moves. I can win the ending, but a compute will put up a damn strong defense because it will push the loss out as far as possible. If the human makes an inaccuracy, they can easily go past the 50 move draw limit. Even Grandmasters have failed.

I have some bad news for you; none of your opponents are computers, and your "test" is silly. Computers play chess well; if you are playing the sort of opponents who will stick around after you drop a fools mate, then you are very low rated, maybe 1100. None of your opponents will be computers because computers will all earn ratings well over 2000, and the people who are cheating won't waste their time playing you--they are cheating because they want rating points, and they won't get those from playing an 1

wow, the first post by someone who knows what they're talking about. in contrast, i know almost nothing about chess, but something about statistics.

everyone should read the article. matching ivanov's moves to a computer's moves is only one test. the author of the article also has an algorithmic chess rating methodology he calls "intrinsic rating" which intends to estimate quality of play along the FIDE scale. it is, of course, flawed as any algorithm for this would be, but most importantly it is a fixed alg

If you can internalize calculating every possible move several plies deep, then you are right. But no human can, so you are wrong. My bet is you have never played more than a casual game of chess and don't understand how humans play chess or how computers do. They are two entirely different phenomenon.

Watch a computer play the defending side. It will always pick the move that requires the longest mating combination. People will play by principle and defend or attack in a logical, but less than perfectly efficient manner. I submit that if I set up a complicated beginning position and gave it to a GM vs a strong computer and had someone randomly assign sides, that I could tell you with 100% certainty which player had each side with only the game score and an endgame tablebase.

The computer is there to be abused:) I am very interested in the process of improving at chess and what causes people to plateau. So, I've taken to a number of strategies to evaluate effectiveness. Ultimately, to improve, I found that one must truly understand what one does not understand. This sounds superficial or even tautological, but it isn't. Too often players chalk losses up to a "random blunder" or not having memorized an opening enough. The reality is that our minds have a very small set of "rules" we use to select moves.

During these sessions I actually wrote down my candidate moves for each move, and then wrote a rationale for why I chose the move. Often, one can make the right move for the wrong reasons and the other way around as well. By understanding thinking patterns, i can later identify mistakes and enlist stronger players in reviewing my games. It is effective, but very very very time consuming and energy consuming.

Fortunately, the computer is a patient partner. The downside is it cannot offer truly insightful commentary to help a human player. For that you need a mentor, or at the minimum a peer to assist.

1. Some algorithms work by simply looking ahead at all possible move combinations by you and your opponent. It then determines a "score" based on the favor of the outcome in whichever player's direction. It may then, for each outcome or only for "favorable" ones, go down another turn for both players. Eventually it will select a move that results in the most "favorable" outcomes and the least "unfavorable" ones based on how the other player moves. This isn't something you can internalize as the computer

But they pretty much know he was by the evidence, it's only _how_ that is unknown.

He was playing much much higher than his ranking should normally permit. They suspected the internet broadcast of the game was being analyzed and moves sent back to him somehow.So, they disabled the internet broadcast. From that point forward, he made mistakes over and over, much more in line with his ranking.

It wasn't just his unexpected high performance, but also the expected drop in performance once the internet broadcast of the game was disabled.

1 -- they learned chess mostly/exclusively by playing against a machine rather than against human opponents. Then their strategy would mostly be informed by or similar to the type of gameplay which they have observed kicking their own ass as they learned to play. Thus they might "play like a computer" because they have internalized the computer's algorithms as they learned to play chess.

Not possible. The cheater made exactly the same moves as the chess program Houdini 2.0c. Not "play like a computer", but play identical to a specific version of an actual computer program. With the exception of the opening moves, which of course are just a random choice from the usual standard openings.

re a deck-of-cards computer wouldn't get you very far at masters level....
Good point. The article is a lot more about another article that K.W. Regan has written about "Measuring Fidelity to a Computer Agent" (which sounds more like spies mindlessly following Dear Leader;>) rather than about a chess-playing agent) at http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~regan/chess/fidelity/ [buffalo.edu]
which has some interesting links I have not followed yet..
Regan even concedes the point I made above by stating in the third paragraph:

First, if a player is so clever that cheating can't be detected in situ, but only after the fact by statistical analysis, then there is nothing that can done. I read the article a few days ago, and this is what I came away with. That they have some vague idea that the wins are statistically unlikely, but if there is process that can be shown to facilite the cheating, then you are going to have matches and ranking determined by statistical algorithm, not competition.

I wouldn't call it a 'vague idea'. Ivanov, while being a very good player at a 2227 'master' rating, was playing at an estimated level of over 3000 over the course of an entire tournament (until they cut the internet feed). This would make him the best player in the world by far [fide.com], and also the greatest player the world has ever seen.

This would be like a college basketball small forward chosen number 10 or so in the NBA draft beating Lebron James 1on1 9 times in a row.
To quote the article:

Either:

1 Borislav Ivanov is probably the first adult (as opposed to a junior talent) with a confirmed low rating ever to achieve a 2600+ GM norm performance in an event of nine rounds or more or

2 [He] is the first player ever to successfully cheat at a major tournament over multiple rounds without the cheating mechanism being detected.

Hold the tournament on a commercial airliner that repeatedly takes off and lands. Certainly if someone on board the plane was using an electronic device during take off or landing something terrible would happen;)

Over the board (OTB) is one thing, but online (c)heating becomes incredibly hard to detect in situ, for pretty obvious reasons. The online chess community has taken a couple of approaches to detect this. For PlayChess Online (a server that hosts online games), they try to detect if your computer is running another process that is a known Chess Engine while you are playing your game. Easily subverted by having two computers, or even a Virtual Box setup.

The most successful way to detect cheating is in postmortem review. I worked with the ICC/FICS Slow Time Control league team (one guy usually) who would run move correlation statistics off suspicious games. There were lots of parameters in his analysis to tweak: ignore book (pre-planned) openings, use endgame tables, tolerance threshold, plys deep to look, how many branches to examine, etc. I was part one of the peer reviewers of the system and an occasional game. The basic idea was to run the moves through a few engines and find out how high the move correlation was for both players. In certain points of the game, the move correlation is very high because good candidate moves are obvious. However, over a single 35move game (avg), GM correlation with any of the popular chess engines (even HIARCS, which supposedly plays more like a human) was around 23%. 1800 level players (club level) were even less. Magnus Carlsen wasn't on the scene yet; he apparently learned more from the computer than any human. Perhaps he'd be higher. The typical cheater scored around 98%.

This of course is not to say that there couldn't be a player who "thought like a computer". But this would put in question the main criticism of game specific AI, and general AI, that they do not actually model how the human brain thinks. Finding a human who thought like a computer would actually be incredibly interesting to the whole field of AI. That being said, the burden at that point is on the cheater to prove because he is well beyond a reasonable doubt.

Setup a Fool's mate [wikipedia.org] intentionally. A cheater using an auto-play program will fall for it at no time. A human cannot spot a fool's mate that fast. As long as the game is finished (checkmate or not) within 30 seconds since it started, the game will not count as rated.

Not any more.Garry Kasparov lost a match to a program several years ago - back when he was the world champion. Nowadays it is taken as a given that a top program on adequate hardware will overwhelm any human player. The human may win the odd game but most of the time he will be steamrollered.

So it is doubtful that Garry Kasparov would lose to Chessmaster XI at its highest AI on a normal computer a.k.a. not Deep Blue.

Don't bet on it. Deep Blue [wikipedia.org] was designed in 1996. That was 17 years ago. A modern laptop has more computing power than Deep Blue had. Chess algorithms have also improved. You can download free chess programs from any app store that will play at grandmaster level.

Playing chess against a computer is like having a weight lifting contest with a forklift.

It might play at "grandmaster level," but it will not play "like a grandmaster." Humans and computers approach chess very differently, which is why this case is so interesting. From the statistical analysis, the guy's either cheating, or he's the not only best player in the world (3000+ level gameplay) but also the first human who thinks like a computer. Well, a human who thinks like a computer so long as a live internet feed of the game is being broadcast, but suddenly plays like a 2200-level human when the feed is cut.

The first series (1996) was a PR scam. It is incorrect to say he was playing 'Deep Blue'. It is far, far more correct to say he was playing a team, comprising many of the top players, who used Deep Blue to test their moves before implementing them. The programming on the machine changed daily. In the second series, the program was - according to IBM - only changed between games... although there was a serious question of a mid-game change (Game 1) that led to the computer's loss.

The point of the article is a bit different. If you win using a computer then you are cheating.

Not sure if Big blue or whatever is the top chess computer by now consistently wins over top chess players, but at least not long ago humans used to consistently win over computers, so winning against computers is (still) not cheating per se.

It is mathematically proven to be unsolveable within finite time, as the problem is in class NP.

No. No it is not. I am not sure where you got this, but chess is easily solvable in finite time. It is a simple tree search but incredibly massive. My desktop, given enough time and a massive increase in memory, could solve chess. Granted the memory would take up a planet the size of Saturn and the time would run into issues with the heat death of the universe, but this is much different than being "unsolvable within finite time".

What does it even mean? NP is the class of problems that can be decided using a non-deterministic Turing machine in polynomial time."Polynomial time" refers to the class of algorithms that run in O(n^c) where c is a constant.The "n" in O(n^c) refers to the size of the input. Big-O notation is only meaningful when talking about asymptotic behaviour (as n approaches infinity).

But chess is a given, specific problem, where n=8 (let's say), and there is no asymptotic behaviour anywhere. N is always the same - it

Actually, no. The only things limiting the length of the game for permutations where each side could, say, begin moving a few endgame pieces back and forth endlessly, are the "50-move" and "draw by threefold repetition" rules. However, claiming a draw by either of these means is -not mandatory-, so unlikely as it may be practically, both sides could elect to never claim a draw under either rule and the shuffling of pieces could go on infinitely.

In addition to the problems pointed out by MyLongNickName, it is worth pointing out that problems being in NP don't mean they aren't solvable. Quite the opposite in fact: any fixed problem in NP is solvable. The issue is that some problems in NP (the so-called NP complete problems) are conjecturally difficult to solve. Roughly speaking, P is the set of questions which can be solved in time that is bounded by polynomial of the length of the problem statement. So for example, "Is the number n prime?" can be answered in time which is polynomial in the length of its input (here the input is the digits of n). Problems in NP are problems which when the answer is "yes" a proof exists that is the answer is yes, and the proof size is bounded by a polynomial of the input length, and the proof can be verified in polynomial time. So to solve a problem in NP one essentially needs to just check all the possible proofs of short size. The big conjecture is that P and NP are actually distinct- that is that there are problems where it is easy to prove a solution works but finding a solution is tough.

But there's another problem here. Even saying that chess is in NP isn't accurate. There are multiple generalizations of what one means by chess and since complexity classes require not single problems but sets of problems, what framework you use to call "chess" matters. http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/6563/what-is-the-computational-complexity-of-solving-chess [stackexchange.com] discusses this in some detail. In some frameworks, "chess" is actually in the much larger set of EXP or PSPACE, which are worse than NP in general, but are still finite time solvable.

I thought it was more if you win playing the same moves that a computer would make you are cheating.

This presupposes that computers play chess differently to humans. My understanding with chess is that there are certain 'stock' moves, openings and such like, that players memorize and use to their advantage. What if someone has set up positions and studied a computer response to those positions or play, would repeating the learned computer moves be the equivalent of cheating? What impact does an eidetic memory have on this where a person is able recall those positions and moves exactly?

The idea that there was some undetected cheating mechanism at play in the case in the article seems to go against the principle of Occam's Razor. The simplest solution to the issue is that either Ivanov just had a great tournament, or that his opponents played into situations for which he'd prepared with the aid of a computer, or a combination of the two. Such appears to be the level of mistrust in chess though that this simple solution is dismissed in search of something more fantastical.

I thought it was more if you win playing the same moves that a computer would make you are cheating.

In the old days, beyond student level, you had to play against tough human opponents to grind out experience, slowly learn to play like your human opponents, and with any luck you'd advance beyond your human trainers.

In the new day, because the computers are the strongest players and always available etc, you'll grind your experience out against a computer, slowly learn to play like your computer opponents, and with any luck you'll advance beyond the programmers of your computer trainers.

It seems inevitable that in a couple generations human chess will look "computer" to a current player.

I thought it was more if you win playing the same moves that a computer would make you are cheating.

In the old days, beyond student level, you had to play against tough human opponents to grind out experience, slowly learn to play like your human opponents, and with any luck you'd advance beyond your human trainers.

In the new day, because the computers are the strongest players and always available etc, you'll grind your experience out against a computer, slowly learn to play like your computer opponents, and with any luck you'll advance beyond the programmers of your computer trainers.

It seems inevitable that in a couple generations human chess will look "computer" to a current player.

In the "old days", when I used to play in USCF tournaments (1980s), most all programs played from an opening book, and once taken out of the book moves, utilized a brute force tree search, rating each position with a score as it went. down the tree. The longer they were given to "think", the more moves they could "look ahead". This caused programs to be very good at tactical play, as they wouldn't miss any obvious errors that were within the next few moves. It did leave them susceptible to being overpowe

Sorry, that is not the way it works. Humans playing computers rather learn to play "anti computer" chess. You cannot learn to do the dumb calculation of all variants to depth >20 ply by playing a computer, even though the computer will do this. It just does not work that way. The human advantage is about "understanding" positions, and if you do not use this ability you will not get very good.

I thought it was more if you win playing the same moves that a computer would make you are cheating.

This presupposes that computers play chess differently to humans. My understanding with chess is that there are certain 'stock' moves, openings and such like, that players memorize and use to their advantage. What if someone has set up positions and studied a computer response to those positions or play, would repeating the learned computer moves be the equivalent of cheating? What impact does an eidetic memory have on this where a person is able recall those positions and moves exactly?

I can comment a bit at this. I used to play in chess tournaments in my state some years ago. I was at a very low level in most of them. To put it in simple terms, I was about as far away in talent from the best players in my state (not my country or the world, but just my state) as I could be. I gave up playing chess because bluntly put, computers ruined it. You are right that players memorize openings. The list of known openings and known variations of those openings is staggering. Honestly, it's more than most people can memorize. Back in the 1990s when I played, it was unusual for a known opening to go beyond maybe 7 or so moves before you "got out of book" as they put it and responses started to deviate from known ones. Keep in mind that while you could always deviate very early from known responses, the odds of such being successful were quite low as if the move was really any good, it would already be known. Now add to this the knowledge that since white moves first, he controls the game. So if I as a player think "I'm really hoping white opens with e4 as I've been dying to try out the black side of this variation of the Ruy Lopez", white may open with d4, destroying my chance to defend an e4 opening. Even if white opens with e4 as I hope, on his 2nd move he may prevent the Ruy Lopez variation that I wanted to play. So you can see that what you have to learn is quite enormous because when you play black,you have to be prepared for all kinds of openings that you may not ever play when you have the white pieces.

Computer analysis took to openings to deeper levels of known good responses. So an opening that used to be maybe 7 moves long before you got out of book was now 13-14 moves long. At some point it just becomes impossible to keep up. To be honest with you, I put a lot of time into trying to improve and I really didn't make much progress. It was already tough enough for me to keep up before computers got involved and I just gave up as I felt like I was getting left further and further behind. To be honest with you, a lot of the tournaments weren't much fun. A lot of the guys who showed up to them were really weird. It made me question whether I really wanted to spend a lot of time getting better at something that attracted defective people to it. It's not unheard of for guys to be exceptionally good at chess and be homeless because they can't keep a job. Fischer himself was a genius player but if there was ever a crazier World Champion than him, I don't know who that would be.

I also played (back in the 80s...never got beyond a 1500 rating myself). Your comment that most openings didn't go beyond 7 or so moves is incorrect. Look up "The Encyclopedia of Chess Openings", and you'll see what I mean. It was a five volume set of books back in my time. As you pointed out, you had to learn to play a whole set of openings. As black, learning the Pirc (e4 opening), Grunfield (d4 opening), and English (c4 opening) covered 99% of all the games I ever played. Beyond that, learning strategic positioning, and basic endgames will allow you to win against nearly anyone who doesn't play regularly. There's a lot of pattern recognition necessary to play well, which requires a lot of practice. Also, learning to pick out "candidate moves" (see "Think Like a Grandmaster" by Sammy Reshevsky), and how to analyze them helped me a lot.

There were forced lines in (for example) the Sicilian which went to over 20 moves back in the 70's. If you could not follow them (I certainly could not), the idea was to avoid those lines. There was far more thud and blunder at the level I played at which was just fine - I never took chess that seriously and never even dreamed of playing it professionally.

The Pirc used to be a good "alternative" opening but towards the end of my time as a player I found more and more opponents who could handle it better w

It seems pretty obvious upon RTFA that this guy is likely to have cheated.

One of Ivanov’s losses was in a long game in a closed position (the kind where computers perform poorly), and at the end, Ivanov made a rudimentary mistake. It stood out because of how well he had played in the other games. The other loss was in the penultimate round, when the organizers, as a precaution, stopped broadcasting the games on the Internet so that people outside the playing hall could not try to assist the players.

Please mod this post up so other people can see it -- I'm sorry I don't have an account and I'm late for work.

I knew some good youth players back in the days (I'm talking early '90s, elo ranking around 2000), and of course they analyzed their opponents previous games with Fritz (best Chess program at that time) to see how to play these guys.
That's hardly cheating, it's just a tool in getting better (as long as you don't use it during the game;-)).
Mind that those people know how to play. Even the supposed 'cheater' has an elo ranking of >2200. That's already pretty damn good. It's not like this guy would sud

If you play against a computer you may be able to do really well if you have memorized the moves that someone else has made in a successful game against that computer or a similar computer. If you do memorize a whole chess game from both sides you are of course good, so maybe it's not cheating, but it's a way to rig the game into what's hopefully your favor. As long as the computer responds with known responses you can stick to the memorized moves, if the computer doesn't you have to re-evaluate what's need

> I thought it was more if you win playing the same moves that a computer would make you are cheating.

As Regan points out, this is only unlikely if you play the same moves as a computer, and many of these are cases where the advantage of the chosen move was tiny. If the computer chooses moves that are forced or better by a clear margin, so will a good player. On the other hand, if the computer's preferred move is only better by an insignificant amount, it's very unlikely that a human will repeatedly do

Borislav Ivanov is probably the first adult (as opposed to a junior talent) with a confirmed low rating ever to achieve a 2600+ GM norm performance in an event of nine rounds or moreâ¦or

[He] is the first player ever to successfully cheat at a major tournament over multiple rounds without the cheating mechanism being detected.

The level of mistrust in chess is not that high but this case was exceptional.

There was one thing in the article which was pretty much garbage - Although Magnus Carlsen recently broke Garry Kasparovâ(TM)s all-time rating record to reach 2861, my program for "Intrinsic Ratings" clocked Ivanov's performance in the range 3089-3258 depending on which games and moves are counted according to supplementary information in the case . ...Magnus Carlsen's rating is based on his results over the last 12 months. He has played tournaments to a standard of over 3000, just not over a whole year. If you play a tournament containing strong players, win most of your games and draw the rest, you will have a stratospheric rating from that tournament. Ivanov actually lost a game or two and the author is clearly cherry-picking, only counting games where he won and ignoring those where he did not.ELO ratings are based on wins, draws and defeats, along with the opponent's rating. The quality of the moves made is totally irrelevant.

Hence it'll play "humanly", it'll play "ruley", it'll play "alien"... Maybe that can be concidered "computery". But there is overlaps with humans in the "humanly" department, and if humans study statistically proven moves, then there's more... Etc.

It's not "moves" that can be memorized that would distinguish a computer from a human player. It is when the player makes entire series of moves that make no sense until you can see 14 moves ahead.

okay... that article is worthless, but googling around it seems that `neocheating' is just regular cheating with some NLP-type confidence nonsense thrown in. nice racket, i'm sure there are self-proclaimed experts giving seminars on this crap. could you give me one example of neocheating which is materially distinct from regular cheating?

How exactly do you think that card manipulations tricks, collusion, and information sharing can help you cheat in a game of chess - in which there are no cards, there is no hidden information, and there are only two players?

Lance Armstrong was initially judged by the USADA to have used PED based not on testing results, but on the testimony of former teammates, some of whom failed their own tests, and may have had an ax to grind. First, because they feel they may have been singled out because of their assocation with Armstrong,second because they may have been pressured by Armstrong or the relationship to use PED, third because they may actually have witnessed Armstrong either taking PEDs or encouraging it, and fourth ALL of the above. The end result is that no one in cycling at the international level will be able to withstand the mere accusations. Non-analytical positives will become the norm. Every champion will be suspect, unless 100% testing is done, and then, as in Armstrong's case, new tests will be conducted on previosuly collected samples, in effect finding athletes guilty in arrears for using PEDs not yet known. Eventually coffee and Gatorade will be banned. And this will stain cycling to the point that fans like myself will turn away.

Chess will go this route. No Master of any rank will be allowed to exceed their 'reasonable' ability. Analysis will be conducted, perhaps electronic surviellance will be used to both check for transmissions and as forensics to be subjected to detailed analysis, suspects will be accused, strip-searched, imaged, run through the metal detectors, scrutinized, and judged guilty based on non-analytical positives. Chess will devolve into the meanest of states, blood sport not for the winners, but for the losers. I expect past upsets to be scrutinized for problems and winners discredited, even posthumously.

A pox on all of it. I'm watching the America's Cup. Less cheating, more suspense, and people could drown.